How to Fight Sports Streaming Fragmentation Fatigue
The fragmentation of sports streaming rights and the proliferation of channels with some matches but not others makes it increasingly difficult for fans to track their teams’ upcoming games. Free Live Sports President Cathy Rasenberger, Play Anywhere CSO Pete Scott, Hub Entertainment Research Principal Jon Giegengack, and MTech Sport’s Matt Stagg discuss ongoing discoverability challenges and how Free Live Sports, Roku with its Sports Zones, Fox One, the ESPN app, and others are trying to create new sports destinations to counteract sports streaming’s disaggregation crisis.
Solving Sports Streaming’s Disaggregation Discovery Crisis
Stagg kicks off the discussion with a look at the disaggregated rights picture in the UK and its impact on fans. When he was growing up, he reflects, Premier League football matches "used to be on a single channel. And then Sky came in and took the rights for the Premier League. Then we had BT Sport, and TNT Sport come in, and those rights were split. Then Amazon came in, and we're seeing the same with the Champions League. So we have fragmentation fatigue, where not only do people have to pay more to follow their team, but sometimes they don't even know what [channel] it's on."
Turning to Rasenberger, he asks, "Kathy, about how do we [deal with] this discovery crisis we're seeing, not just across sports, but also as different programs and series move between platforms?"
“Discovering any content is the biggest problem in our industry right now," Rasenberger replies, acknowledging that the problem is most acute when it comes to sports. "It's the source of the greatest frustration for sports fans. You look at how people discover their content right now, and the majority are getting it through friend recommendations, or through ChatGPT perhaps. With Free Live Sports," she continues, "what we've tried to do is to create a destination for a sports fan in one place so it's a pure, all-sports destination. It's like a clubhouse. They come to the clubhouse to see the sport they want, and then they discover other sports while they're there. So we think having an all-sports destination makes a greater magnet for [bringing] sports fans to one place."
Scott speaks to the underlying business issues complicating the rights landscape. "Leagues are looking to make revenue," he says. "And the tough part about it is, I was one of those people who were paying a lot for rights at Warner Brothers to have this content. So you understand that side of the equation, you understand it's a business and that's the reality and they have to have multiple bidders, just like if you were selling your house."
Scott goes on to suggest ways AI can help to address the discovery challenges inherent to the market's current state of fragmentation. As for "the conundrum with the fan trying to find" the games they want to see, "I think you can start to establish agents or AI that can start to hit those databases and make it very, very easy for people to find the content based on a zip code, part of the country, or part of the world."
Even if this degree of fragmentation persists, which Scott believes it will, he argues that the discovery situation can still improve. "I think the key will be, what will be the incentive? If the incentive is just, 'Hey, I want to tell you where this EPL game is playing in Australia.' Can it just be as simple as that? Or does it have to be, 'Well, if I land Cathy on that experience in Australia, do I get compensated because she signs up for an account?' But I do think agents will help. So I think it'll get better, but I also am realistic. The leagues need to make money and the broadcasters need to make money."
Opportunities for Aggreggators and Single-Destination Solutions
Hub’s Giegengack shares both Scott’s cautious optimism, and also Rasenberger’s sense that sports content aggregation isn’t just a viable solution but a great opportunity for aggregators, given how badly sports fans want to watch their teams and how annoyed they get when they can’t find or access them.
"As Cathy said, finding content of any kind is the biggest problem consumers have right now, but they get extra pissed off when they can't find sports because if you want to watch the Eagles game, there's no substitute." In this way, he says, sports differs from other types of programming. "If you can't find some buzzy original series, there's probably some other buzzy original series you can watch instead."
Sports' unique drawing power, he contends, presents "a big opportunity for aggregators. "Roku has kind of stepped into the breach here with their Sports Zones, which will round up all the content related to a particular sport into one place, and then you can click on it and it will guide you to where that content is available. So it's fulfilling Roku's core mission, which is agnostically just trying to help you find the thing that you're after in the shortest amount of time. And I think in the future, the leagues and their broadcast and streaming partners will want to do that on their own. There's obviously a lot of incentive for the NFL to be available in a bunch of different places because they'll get in front of more people and then they can have a bidding war. But there isn't any incentive for them to make it harder for casual fans or fans [whose interest is] growing."
Trying sports' fans patience by making discovery more difficult, Giegengack goes on to say, comes at a cost. "If you make it hard to find, eventually you're going to start to lose engagement with some of those people, and that's not good for the future of the sport," he says. "So I think that the sports themselves and their broadcast and streaming partners are going to start to tackle this problem on their own as well."
"One of the things that Jon and I have talked about in the past is actually driving people back to single destinations," Rasenberger says. "ESPN Unlimited is hugely popular. You did a research study, Jon, where 85% of people interviewed said that they would take ESPN Unlimited because it had the most of the content they wanted in one destination and they'd do it for $30. And then even more attractive is the combination of Fox One with ESPN Unlimited because you get the majority of your entertainment and your sports in one destination. So people want simplicity, and if we keep disaggregating sports and making discovery so difficult, I think it's going to drive people back to single-destination."
Join us February 24–26, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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